Opera study highlights country-specific user behaviour

Opera study highlights country-specific user behaviour:

Opera Software has released its latest State of the Mobile Web report, which is based on anonymous and aggregated data from the servers of Opera Mini, its mobile web browser.

As part of this, the company has released stats on Opera Mini usage throughout January 2012. It recorded 159m users over the course of the month, who viewed 108.7bn pages.

Compared to December 2011, the increase was 4.2 % on a month-to-month basis for users, and 5.4% growth for page views.

In terms of trends, the study considers shifts in global surfing patterns, with two-thirds of all countries surveyed more active on the mobile web during weekdays than the weekends.

Though data from Opera has its limitations (users tend to be skewed towards certain handsets and therefore demographic groups), the report shows a 6% increase in page views and data for the UK at the weekend, but 1.6% drop in unique users (see left).

In fact, it's clear that even though the majority of countries have more unique users browsing during weekdays, it’s not uncommon for page views and data transferred to be up on weekends (as people probably have more time to browse then).

Typical 'weekend countries', in terms of the total number of users, are Egypt, Iran, Ghana, Ethiopia and Tanzania, who top the list for increase in weekend users as compared to weekday users. For Egypt, this means a 7.6% increase in the unique user number as soon as the weekend comes around.

Typical 'weekday countries' are Romania, Belarus, Moldova, the United States and Poland, who show the opposite trend on weekend days. When the weekend is over, consumers resume surfing again.

Opera Software CEO Lars Boilesen said that the trends show that mobile web users in different countries do behave differently on the mobile web.

"Their reasons to be a ‘weekend surfer’ or a ‘weekday surfer’ may vary, but the statistics remain very consistent throughout the measured period.”

It's also important to remember that a drop in users on weekends doesn’t necessarily correlate with a drop in page views and data traffic.

For example, the country of Georgia had a slight drop in users over the weekend, but topped the list for growth in pages viewed during the weekend.